Thread: Push Traffic 101 - Creatives

In this part I want to talk a bit about creatives with you.

It´s important for me to keep the whole creative part simple, there is no need to make it more complicated than needed.

I have a rather general rule set for my creatives that works for most verticals but there also are some exceptions that I explain later.

But apart from just the text and icons there are also few other things to take care of with the creatives.

The best creative won´t help when it just doesn´t receive enough volume.

I will tell more about that aspect later.
Let´s first check the different elements in the creatives one by one.

The Icon

The icon is only very small so you should take care that it isn´t too complicated.

It should be in a way that the users see immediately what it is about.
And with this I only mean that they should be able to recognize the icon, the icon doesn´t necessarily have to do with the offer you are promoting.

It´s rather a „Hey, you have a notification“ to get the user interested to check the rest of your creative.

What I like is to just use message icons.
Go to google and search for message icons and grab few of them.

I have a folder with about 30 or so different message icons and in probably 95% of my campaigns I use these.

There are better ones to use and not that good ones.

I prefer to use coloured icons because from my experience they work better than black and white ones.

Here are some message icons (in the green boxes) that I would consider as good to test.





Now most of these icons are just that – message icons.
What I like to do is to add a „1“ to the icon so that it looks like „1 New Message“.

Before



After



Another very good option to get message icons is to go to Adplexity and just grab them from there.



The reason I like to use message icons is that they do basically exactly what I want, they show the users that they have a notification.
They are very clear in their „message“

When you use icons that are more related to the offers you are promoting you risk that the users don´t recognize them immediately.

A good example is when you promote sweeps and use an image of an Iphone 11 or Samsung S10 as icon.
Users see that it´s a phone but often can´t see right away what model it is.

Here are some verticals where message icons work just as good as vertical specific icons.

- Sweepstakes (icons of the offers I promote)
- Casino (Slot machines, „Jackpot 777“)
- Nutra COD (Lemons, few other icons I grabbed from Adplexity)
- AV/VPN (Warning Signs and simiar)
- Crypto (Bitcoin symbols etc)
- Mobile content/Push sub collections (there I only used rather general icons and text)

But there are also some exceptions, there were 2 verticals where the message icons didn´t work that good

- Dating (for dating small images of girls, asses worked better)
- Games/Browser Games (here icons like small image of game graphics or game logo worked better)

So for most campaigns I use message icons at least for a test because it´s much easier and faster to test then.
Later I also splittest message icons vs offer specific icons.

But the notifications have not only the icons, they also have...

The Big Image

Here I also like to keep it as simple as possible.

And this means that I also like to test with no big image at all.

You know the saying „A picture is worth a thusand words“.

But this works in both directions, good as well as bad.

So when you use a good big image it can definitely help.
But when you use a bad image it can hurt your campaigns alot as well.

That´s why I like to test with no big image at all.

No image – no damage

There are good trafficsources out there that don´t support big images anyway and you can still run very good campaigns there.

When you eliminate an element from the creative the test process becomes faster and easier.

But again, a good image can also help so once you have a good funnel it´s absolutely worth to test big image vs without big image.

For the big images there are basically the same rules as for the icons: keep them simple so that the user immediatley can see what it is about.

That means that you shouldn´t use too much text there, not many graphic elements, not overloaded stuff.

When you use different elements in the big image like background image and CTA also make sure that they have a high contrast and focus the users eyes on the more important element that way.

Make it for the users easy to „read“ the images.

For sweepstakes it often also works good when you show people holding the „prize“.

In other verticals more „native-like“ images can work pretty good as well.

Here are some good vs bad examples for different verticals

Amazon Gift Card Good






Amazon Gift Card Bad






iPhone 11 Good






iPhone 11 Bad






Casino Good






Casino Bad






Weight Loss Good






Weight Loss Bad






Dating and (Browser) Games are an exception here again.
Just like the icons these verticals work often better with big images.

I guess the reason is that dating as well as games are rather visual verticals where images have a much higher impact compared to other verticals.

But for the images the same rules apply, keep it simple and not too overloaded.

World Of Tanks Good






World Of Tanks Bad








Dating Good






Dating Bad








That´s about the images for now.

When you have specific questions just post them here.

But the images are only one part of the creative and the text is the more important part.

The text consists of the title and the description.

For the title you mostly have about 30 characters, for the description 40-70 characters (depending on the trafficsource).
As you can see there is not much room for a long message so we have to make it clear with as less characters as possible.

When you need to translate your creatives text to other languages just use Google translate for it.
For such short phrases it works good.

The Title

The title is basically just as an eyecatcher to get the user curious enough that he wants to know more.
You don´t even have to put info about the offer you are promoting in the title, it´s only important that you use a title that gets the user curious enough to read the description as well.

You can use general text in the title like

- (1) New Message
- Congratulations, you were selected
- (1) Important Message

That way you don´t say at all what the offer you promote is about but it´s enough to grab the users attention so that he wants to check the decsription.

You can also use titles that are already related to the offer, basically to warm the user up for the description.

When I use rather catchy titles I often make the first character of each word in upper case and/or write specific words completely in uppercase to drag more attention towards these words.

- Earn $xxx Per Day From Home
- Date A Hot Girl Tonight
- #1 Weight Loss Secret Revealed
- How to get a FREE iPhone 11

Another good tactic is when you use questions in your title

- Is Your Phone Too Slow?
- Are You Looking For A Date?
- Can You Beat The Highscore?

All these titles can work pretty good already but now let´s spice them up a bit.

For this we use our superweapon – Emojis

When you use Emojis it can help alot to get a higher CTR but not all Emojis work same for all campaigns.
I always try to use Emojis that are at least a bit related to what I promote.

When I promote Antivirus offers for example it doesn´t make sense to use a smiling Emoji then.
Or when I run dating it doesn´t make sense to use a car Emoji.

And although Emojis can help alot we still shouldn´t over do it.
I usually use maximum 1 Emoji in the title and 1 Emoji in the description.

Here are some example for few different verticals.

Dating Emojis




Gaming Emojis




Sweeps Emojis




AV/Booster/Cleaner Emojis




Streaming Emojis




Financial Offers/Crypto




Then there is one more Emoji that is good to use: The arrow.

When you use a wording in your tilte that just by itself wouldn´t get the user to check the description a down arrow can help to move the users view to the description.

- iPhone 11 for FREE? ⬇️
- Blockbuster in HD for FREE ⬇️
- Lose Weight Easy And Fast ⬇️

The down arrow can also work pretty good when we use scarcity tactics

- Only Today ⬇️
- Limited Supply ⬇️
- As Long As Supply Lasts ⬇️
- Act Now Before It´s Too Late ⬇️

Ok, now we learned how to use the title as an appetizer to make the users hungry for the description

The Description

In the description you have the glorious task to put info about the offer, a sales pitch and a CTA in olny 40-75 characters.

The good thing about it is that you don´t have to write a long text, the bad thing about it is that even if you wanted you can´t write a longer text.

As you can imagine, in the description there is no room for bullshit.
All that matters there are clear and short phrases or instructions for the user.

In the title we only wanted to bring the users attention to the description, now it´s time to give him info about what we are promoting to get him interested enough in our offer to click on our ad.

This is not always that easy to decide between more text for info about the offer or more text for a strong CTA.

For things like „You can win an iPhone 11. Click here to read more about it“, „Best voted Browser Game in 2020. Sign up NOW to play it for free“ or „Make $5k per day with Bitcoin. Click here to learn the trick“ you often don´t have enough characters to use.

One tactic that you use is to just integrate the CTA directly in the description.

- Click Here To Win An iPhone 11
- Sign Up Today To Receive Your Bonus
- Play The #1 Voted Game For Free Now
- Learn The $5k/Day Bitcoin Secret HERE
- Scan your PC for up to 67% more speed

Another tactic I often use is to don´t use a CTA at all in the description and instead I just put an arrow at the end to show the user he should click there to continue.

- 37 Girls from your area are looking for a date ➡️
- The Secret Trick To WIN With Bitcoins ➡️
- Lose 20 Pounds In 10 Days, Easy And Fast ➡️
- The $750 Gift Card Amazon Giveaway ➡️

When you do it like that you have more characters for info about your offer but you still have a strong „CTA“ to tell the user that he shall click there.

And another good way to put more info in the description without wasting characters for a CTA is to just „cut“ the text so that the user knows he has to click when he wants to read more.

This is something that you probably seen more on Native, but you can use it for push creatives as well.

- The weight loss trick to lose 20 pounds[...]
- To make $2k per day you only need to[...]
- You can get an iPhone 11 for $1 because[…]

Alright, now we learned about the different elements in the creatives, about icons and big images as well as title and description.

But this alone doesn't guarantee a good performance.

As I said already in the beginning, the best creative won´t help when it receives no traffic.

To understand what I mean with it let´s check how the trafficsources work because the formula

Higher Bid = Higher Volume

is only partially true, the bid is only one factor for more volume.

When you run your push campaigns on CPC you only pay when a user actually clicks your ad.
This is very good to keep more control over your adspend.

But as you can imagine the trafficsources also want to make money.

That means they send the highest volume to the creatives that make them the most money.

And this isn´t necessarily the creative with the highest bid, it´s rather the creative with the best combination of bid and CTR for the trafficsource.

To know which creatives makes them the most money the trafficsources basically calculate the amount they earn per 1k impressions.

Here is an example to show you better how it works.

Creative A: $1 CPC and 0.1% CTR = 1 click per 1 thousand impressions = $1 CPM
Creative B: $0.10 CPC and 3% CTR = 30 clicks per 1 thousand impressions = $3 CPM

You see, creative A has a 10x higher bid than creative B but because of the lower CTR the trafficsource would make only $1 CPM from creative A and $3 CPM from creative B.

In other words, the creative with the lower bid but higher CTR would make the trafficsource 3x the money as the creative with high bid.

And this is why the creative process can become a bit difficult.

Often it´s no problem to make creatives that are highly related to the offer but then they don´t have a high enough CTR to compete with other creatives.

It´s also no problem to make very high CTR creatives, but then you often have the problem that they are not related enough to the offer so they just don´t convert that good.

The secret is to find a good balance between high enough CTR to compete and being related enough to the offer to still convert.

I usually start with creatives that are very targeted to the offers that I promote and when I don´t receive enough traffic because the CTR is too low I start to change the creatives step by step by step and try to get a higher CTR but still be related to the offer.

That way I make sure that the users that click my ads are interested in my offer and don´t just click because of some clickbait text when they then don´t convert at all.

Unluckily there is no golden formula for CTR vs CVR or CTR vs CPC, just test and try to find that
combination that works best for your campaigns.

But it can help when you difer between the offers you run, when you differ between conversion flows, payouts and stuff.

When I run for example $700 Crypto offers I am not really looking for the highest CTR, there I am rather trying to run really targeted creatives to make sure to only get clicks from users who are really willing to grab their credit card and pay $250 FTP on the offer.

In such case it´s quality over quantity because you want to target a pretty tight audience.

When you however promote offers like sweep SOI that attract a very large and broad audience you can try to go for higher CTR instead.

You can do it by not being too explicit in your text and rather go for clickbaity stuff.
For a better CVR of course it´s good to still be related to the offer.

But when you have a really good converting offer it can also be worth it to go for maximum CTR = highest volume with text that is very general and not related to the offers at all.

- Title: (1) Important Message
Description: Click HERE to read

- Title: You have (1) Message
Description: Click HERE to read

- Title: ATTENTION
Description: Click HERE for more info


Ok, now let´s destroy a myth that you often read about push traffic:

Creative Fatique

Really, there is no creative fatigue similar to banner blindness when you run creatives for few weeks or longer.

I personally have campaigns where I run exactly the same creative for several months.

Why don´t I change it? - Because it still works

Yes, it happens very often that a campaign/creative works very good when you start a campaign and then the volume drops after few days or so.

But this has nothing to do with creative fatigue, the reason is not that too many people have seen your creative in few days so that it doesn´t work anymore.

The reason is that when you start a campaign the creatives receive a traffic boost to check how they perform, what CTR they have and how they compete with other creatives.

When your creatives have a high enough CTR to make the trafficsources enough money they can run for very long time.
When they have a too low CTR and don´t make enough money for the trafficsource you will see that after the initial traffic boost the volume will drop pretty fast.

Ok, now let´s work through it step by step.

The most important task is to find a creative that is converting.
Even 100% CTR on your creatives won´t help at all when it just won´t convert.

So your first step should be to find converting creatives.
When they don´t receive enough volume because of too low CTR you can work on it.

It´s better to do it like this than other way round where you first try to work towards a high CTR.

That way you don´t lose money on traffic that is unrelated to your offer just to maintain a high enough CTR.

When you found a good creative/good creatives that are converting but their CTR is too low to receive enough volume you should try to change them to make it a bit more clickbaity yet still related enough to convert.

It can take some time to understand the process because it´s also different from campaign to campaign but it´s good to find a good balance between CTR and CVR.

For this it´s also good to check average CTRs for different verticals and targetings (mobile vs desktop) so that you get a rough impression what CTR you should try to have.

But often it won´t work that way.
Often you have to sacrifice too much CVR for a high CTR that the creative is not converting good enough anymore and you can´t run it on profit.
In such situation you should rather keep the good converting creative and try to get more volume for it again.

On the other hand even the best creatives sooner or later come to an end.

Again, when a good creative has a big drop in volume it´s often not because of creative fatigue, it´s often only because other creatives make more money for the trafficsource and receive more traffic then.

And when you need more traffic to good creatives with rather low CTR there is a simple trick: You just need to get the creative back into moderation.

What happens then is that the creative has to be approved again and when it´s approved the trafficsource will send an initial traffic boost to the creative again to check how it performs.

The process to receive the trafficboost can be a bit different from trafficsource to trafficsource but in the end it always comes down to one of two options.

Option 1 is easier, there you just need to make a small change to the creative and it will be seen as a „new“ creative that has to be moderated again and when it´s approved it receives the traffic boost.

To be considered as „new“ creative you don´t have to make big changes there, it doesn´t make a difference if you change only one character in the description or if you change icon, image, title and description altogether.

A change is a change and gets the creative back into moderation.

Now let´s check about the best way to make changes without hurting the creatives performance.

To do so it´s best to change the least important element.

Better don´t mess around with the title and description, changes there can have too big impact on the performance.

Depending if you use a big image or not I also wouldn´t change it because it also can have too big impact on the performance.

Now only the icon is left and there you can make very easy changes withough hurting the performance.

Do you remember when we talked about the icons?

Here come the beauty of message icons – When you need to get your creative back into moderation just change the message icon to another similar message icon.

These changes have the smammlest impact on the performance but they still get your creative back into moderation.

When your creative then receives volume again and after few days or so there is another drop just change it back to the original icon.

You can repeat it over and over so with only 2 icons you can run a good creative basically forever when you just switch them back and forth when you need to get into moderation again.

Unluckily this trick is not working on all trafficsources.

Some sources will also put your creative back into moderation when you make changes but they won´t send you the initial test boost then.

In such case the solution is also very easy: Just clone the original campaign with the good working creative on the trafficsource and run it.

Don´t change anything there, keep the same targeting, same bid, same converting creatives, same tracking URL.

That way you will receive a new initial trafficboost to exactly the same converting creatives and when you use the same tracking URL you also have all stats in one tracker campaign and not split across several different campaigns.

A good creative is a good creative and can run for months.

So when traffic drops for that creative it´s always better to find ways to receive more volume to the winning creative again than going into test mode again.

Now at the end of this post let me tell you a bit about my flow, how I start and test creatives.

I often test many different things so for me it´s important to work fast and effective.

That´s why I try to keep the creative process also as simple as possible to check for potential and when I see that it works at all I try to increase the performance.

For the creatives it means: Message icon and no big image.

That way I have one element less to take care of (big image) and also don´t have to spend much time on the icon.

This setup is absolutely enough to see if a campaign has potential or not.
I dont want to waste time on campaigns that don´t have potential anyway and are not worth it.

When I see that it´s working I try to find out if other combinations are doing better.

Let me show you an example of a Casino campaign, how I would start testing creatives and how I would then continue testing variations of a good creative.

1st Stage: Rough Performance Check

In this stage I keep it as simple as possible just to see if the campaign has potential to work or not.

That´s why I start with just a message icon, no big image and few different title/description combinations like these ones







When I found the best working text I continue with it and test different variations.

Let´s assume that the first one is the winning text and let´s check if we can increase performance with other graphics.

2nd Stage: Testing the icons

First I test message icon vs offer related icon to see if it affects CTR and/or CVR







When I found the best working icon I will continue with the winning text and the winning icon and then test if a big image will increase performance even more or not.

3rd Stage: Testing Big Images

Let´s not take the winning combination of text and icon and test if it will work better when we use a big image or not.







After all these teste have finished I should know

- Which text works best
- If message icon or offer related icon is better
- If performance is better with or without big image

When I identified 1 winning creative I use it as long as it works and usually don´t run other tests with different icons/images/text in my main campaign anymore.

I still test other combinations here and there in separate campaigns but I don´t touch the main campaign anymore to don´t mess up my stats.

To keep an overview about the different combinations, what works and what not I use a simple Excel file to track that stuff.

This is an example of how such file looks.

Campaign	Title	Description	Icon/Image that converted	Info about icons and images in campaign	Conversions
Campaign Name 1	Title 1	Description 1	Message icon, big image	Icon: Message, big image	15
Campaign Name 2	Title 1	Description 2	Message icon only	Icon: Message, no big image	23
Campaign Name 3	Title 2	Description 2	Offer Icon, big image	Icon: Message and offer, big image	17
Campaign Name 4	Title 3	Description 3	Offer icon only	Icon: Offer icon, no big image	29
Title 2	Description 3	Message icon, big image 2	Icon: Message and offer icon, big image	9
Campaign Name 6	Title 4	Description 2	Offer icon, big image 2	Icon: Message and offer icon, big image	33

With these files I have all info about the different creative variations all in one place and it´s pretty easy that way to see what is working best.

Well, that´s all for now.

I hope I could give you some insight into the creative part, when you have any questions just post in the thread and I try to answer them as good as possible.